For the third Wednesday in a row, clapping and stomping demonstrators across Belarus yesterday turned out to protest their country’s economic crisis and iron fist of longtime President Alexander Lukashenko, reports the AP . The government has in turn banned all such rallies, using state security forces to break them up…
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Neil Langmead convicted of killing estranged wife and her friend in attack in Barnstaple house A “controlling and dominating” husband has been jailed for a minimum of 30 years for the murder of his estranged wife and her friend in a frenzied sex attack. Neil Langmead, a builder aged 41, repeatedly stabbed Deborah Langmead and Donna St John, both 35 and both mothers of two children. The women were found almost side by side in the blood-soaked kitchen of a burning house in Barnstaple, Devon, in August last year. Both had been sexually assaulted and Mrs Langmead had been sexually mutilated by her husband, either as she lay unconscious or after she was dead. A 13-day trial at Exeter crowncourt heard that Langmead, who had a history of bullying behaviour towards his wife, had been unable to accept that she was starting divorce proceedings. He had been issued with a warning by police for harassing her a week before the murders. Mrs Langmead also had extra bolts put on the doors of the house to make her feel safer. The jury of nine women and three men rejected his version of events, in which he claimed that he had consensual sex with his wife, leading to an argument between the two women which became violent. He said he killed Mrs Langmead in self-defence after intervening and that she killed her friend. The jury accepted the prosecution claim that he had repeatedly stabbed the women before setting fire to the house to cover his tracks. Crime Steven Morris guardian.co.uk
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Arrest of Muhammad Sharif Malekzadeh comes amid growing rift between president and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Iran’s former deputy foreign minister, Muhammad Sharif Malekzadeh, a close ally of the hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been arrested on charges of financial corruption. Malekzadeh resigned from his post two days ago – only a week after he was appointed – after coming under pressure from the conservative-dominated parliament for his connections to Ahmadinejad’s controversial chief of staff and close confidant, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei. In the face of the growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, allies of the president and Mashaei have come under scrutiny or allegedly attempting to undermine clerical power and compromise revolutionary values. Supporters of Khamenei, who include a majority of the parliament, have launched a campaign against Mashaei and his team – who are described as a “deviant current” in the inner circle of the president. In recent weeks, at least 25 people close to Ahmadinejad and Mashaei have been arrested, including presidential aide Kazem Kiapasha, and the head of the cultural committee, Abbas Amirifar. Esmail Kowsari, the deputy head of the parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy, told Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency: confirmed Malekzadeh’s arrest and said: “[Malekzadeh] was arrested this morning on financial fraud charges and because there are numerous existing cases against him.” Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, faced impeachment proceedings on Tuesday over the appointment of Malekzadeh, but the motion was withdrawn after Malekzadeh’s resignation. In his resignation letter, which was addressed to Salehi, Malekzadeh wrote: “Despite dastardly manipulations and plentiful injustices done against me, I can’t accept that you suffer from unjust pressures because of me anymore.” Malekzadeh was a deputy to Mashaei when the latter headed Iran’s cultural heritage and tourism organisation. Conservatives who say Ahmadinejad is under the spell of Mashaei are worried about the increasing influence of the chief of staff in Iran’s politics and have accused his team of anything from corruption to sorcery. Iran’s parliament, at the same time, is believed to be only waiting for Khamenei’s green light to impeach Ahmadinejad for his support for Mashaei. Analysts believe Khamenei would prefer the president to quietly end his term of office rather than confronting him in public. Many believe that the only reason Mashaei himself has not yet been arrested is because Khamenei fears Ahmadinejad might resign if his right-hand man were detained. The president’s resignation would be a blow to Khamenei, who wholeheartedly supported Ahmadinejad in the 2009 disputed presidential election, which gave him a second term in office. Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Middle East Saeed Kamali Dehghan guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Sarah Palin’s bus tour is on hiatus, not breakdown, she insisted yesterday. “Hmm, glad I have media to let me know my plans. They never cease to amaze,” she sniffed after reports that her One Nation bus tour had been truncated or even canceled. Palin says the multi-state tour is…
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Wastewater analysis project to detect legal highs and illicit drugs is turned down by festival founder Michael Eavis as ‘a cheek’ Glastonbury festival has vetoed the first major attempt to test the use of legal highs and illicit drugs at a British festival by sampling sewage. The exercise to be carried by analytical toxicologists had the backing of the police and involved the use of the emerging science of “wastewater analysis”, which can detect even very low concentrations of illicit drugs in liquids. Dr John Ramsey of St George’s medical school, University of London, who has spent months planning the project, said he was disappointed by the decision. “It would have been a golden opportunity to test the technology and find out the actual levels of the use of ‘legal highs’ and new psychoactive compounds,” he said. He said that Glastonbury, with its ethos that “British law applies, but the rules of society are a little bit different, a little bit freer” provided the ideal demographic. Glastonbury festival’s founder Michael Eavis said in a statement: “The drug culture these days has changed beyond belief. What a cheek to even suggest there’s a problem.” More than 100,000 revellers had passed through the gates of the 900-acre site, by near the Somerset village of Pilton, by midday on Thursday. They arrived, as usual, dragging tents, sleeping bags, flags and crates of food through mud. Almost a fortnight of intermittent rain has turned most of the fields into a blanket of sludge, and tractors have already begun distributing emergency bails of straw to absorb the water. This year, though, Glastonbury has the weather forecasters on its side; while some rain is predicted for Friday, most of the weekend should be warm and dry. In total 150,000 will stomp through Worthy Farm during the three-day festival to watch headliners including U2, Coldplay and Beyoncé. When nature calls, they will be forced to use one of the notorious 4,600 portable toilets – some no more than metal boxes with a single open tank. All the festival sewage gets tipped into a huge container and then fed out slowly into the local sewage works over the next few weeks. This gives the toxicologists the opportunity to sample the “wastewater” without having to tackle the problem of sampling the output of thousands of onsite portable toilets. It also ensures the process is totally anonymous. “We can only do it if there is a central sewage system,” said Ramsey, who carried out a similar project at a festival in Antwerp. “The joy of Glastonbury is that they have their own plumbing.” He said that with the government poised to introduce a new “temporary banning system” to counter new legal highs, it was important to establish what people were actually using. Ramsey, whose company Tictac ‘s database provides the police and others with a visual identification of drugs and new substances, said that “wastewater analysis” was becoming established across Europe. The monitoring exercise can only be done if there was a large number of people and they could only identify drugs that appear in urine in the first place and remain stable in sewage. Among the candidates that qualify are mephedrone, ketamine, BZP and mCPP. Avon and Somerset police say the notion that they turn a blind eye to drug use at the festival is a “myth”, and that those caught in possession face prosecution and eviction from the site. But recreational drug-taking is rife, and the fleet of conspicuous undercover police officers only arrest a tiny fraction of people under the influence. By Thursday morning, there had been just 35 arrests. The news that festival organisers had halted the plan to test sewage for drugs prompted a mixed reaction among the hordes arriving at the site. Some conspiracy theorists worried – unjustifiably – that their own drug-taking could be traced through DNA analysis, while others questioned the scientific rigour of sample analysis. Gareth Jones, 37, from Brighton, who said his drug use had steadily declined since his first festival, in 1996, said there were various “cultures” across the festival. “What they find would depend on where exactly in the festival they test,” he said. “If you test up at the stone circle it would probably blow off the scale.” The new technique for monitoring drugs has been used on a small scale in studies of cocaine and amphetamine use in London and south Wales. A recent major project in Paris taking 24-hour samples over a week confirmed a weekend spike in cocaine use in the French capital. In another case the sewage output from a prison was analysed. But it does not always work well. A study in Spain in 2007 established a small village north of Barcelona as the European capital cocaine consumption, but the elderly villagers were relieved to discover that it was due to faulty sampling methods at the local sewage treatment works. Glastonbury 2011 Glastonbury festival Drugs Drugs Pop and rock Festivals Festivals Paul Lewis Alan Travis guardian.co.uk
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Admiral Mike Mullen says withdrawal of 23,000 troops by next summer was bigger than he had been prepared to back America’s most senior commander, Admiral Mike Mullen, described the troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, announced by Barack Obama, as risky. Giving evidence before the Senate’s armed services committee the day after Obama’s decision, Mullen said the withdrawal of 10,000 US troops by the end of this year and a further 23,000 by next summer was bigger than he had originally been prepared to back. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said the reductions were “more aggressive and incur more risk” than he considered prudent. Mullen, who is retiring this year, said: “More force for more time is, without doubt, the safer course. But that does not necessarily make it the best course. Only the president, in the end, can really determine the acceptable level of risk we must take. I believe he has done so.” Military commanders had hoped to hold the number of US and other international troops as close to the present 150,000 as possible, saying they were stretched and needed to protect gains made over the winter. They advised Obama to make only “modest” withdrawals. US and Nato officers will have to further rework their plans for Afghanistan after European countries announced that they would match Obama’s troop reductions, adding to the strain on military commanders in the field. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has 4,000 troops in Afghanistan, said: “France will begin a gradual withdrawal of reinforcement troops sent to Afghanistan, in a proportional manner and in a calendar comparable to the withdrawal of American reinforcements.” The German defence minister, Guido Westerwelle, who has 4,800 troops in Afghanistan, echoed the French, saying he hoped “to be able to reduce our own troop contingent for the first time” by the end of the year. Poland, which has 2,500 troops, is also to reduce its presence this year, according to the country’s head of security, General Stanislaw Koziej. Nato’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, expressed optimism that “the tide is turning” in Afghanistan and that the troop withdrawal was the natural result. Obama went to Fort Drum army base in New York state to highlight his message that America was at the beginning of the end of the war in Afghanistan, even though 68,000 American troops will remain after the planned withdrawals. Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, welcomed Obama’s decision and said that Afghan forces were ready to take over the burden from the departing troops: “The Afghan people’s trust in the Afghan army and police is growing every day and preservation of this land is the job of Afghans,” he said. The Taliban dismissed Obama’s announcement, noting that there would still be a large US presence after the pullout and calling for an immediate withdrawal: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan once again wants to make it clear that the solution for the Afghan crisis lies in the full withdrawal of all foreign troops immediately and [while] this does not happen, our armed struggle will increase from day to day,” the Taliban said. In the US, reaction was mixed, with many Democrats expressing disappointment that the troops reductions were not bigger. Republicans were divided, with some criticising Obama for failing to heed the advice of his military commanders and others sharing the Democratic calls for bigger and faster cuts. The Democratic head of the Senate’s foreign affairs committee, John Kerry, welcomed Obama’s announcement but pinpointed Pakistan rather than Afghanistan as the bigger challenge. On Afghanistan, Kerry said the bottom line was that no number of troops would resolve the problem and that there was a need for a political solution, from reconciliation with the Taliban to shutting down extremist sanctuaries. Mitt Romney, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to take on Obama in next year’s presidential election, repeated his call for speedy withdrawal and criticised Obama for failing to listen to the advice of his commanders. “We all want our troops to come home as soon as possible, but we shouldn’t adhere to an arbitrary timetable on the withdrawal,” said Romney. “This decision should not be based on politics or economics.” US military Afghanistan Barack Obama Obama administration United States Nato Hamid Karzai Ewen MacAskill guardian.co.uk
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Syrian troops pushed to the Turkish border Thursday in their sweep against a 3-month-old pro-democracy movement, sending terrified refugees, including children, sprinting across the frontier to Turkey. (June 22)
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In an audio address to the nation, Libyan leader Colonel Moammar Gadhafi accused NATO of murder, days after the alliance said for the first time its strikes may have caused casualties among civilians in Libya. (June 23)
Continue reading …Anti-Immigrant Showboating By Politicians Leaves Georgia Crops Rotting In The Fields
June 23, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media (h/t Heather) In yet another example of how wingnut politicians act without thinking of the logical consequences, Georgia Republicans passed a law that’s leaving their agricultural industry in sad shape: After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia. It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry. Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him. And you know, here’s where the chickens really come home to roost. Politicians act as if undocumented immigrants contribute nothing to the nation’s economy, when the truth is, they do damned hard and dirty work that Americans consider beneath them: The first batch of probationers started work last week at a farm owned by Dick Minor, president of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. In the coming days, more farmers could join the program. So far, the experiment at Minor’s farm is yielding mixed results. On the first two days, all the probationers quit by mid-afternoon , said Mendez, one of two crew leaders at Minor’s farm. “Those guys out here weren’t out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, `Bonk this, I ain’t with this, I can’t do this,’” said Jermond Powell, a 33-year-old probationer. “They just left, took off across the field walking.” Mendez put the probationers to the test last Wednesday, assigning them to fill one truck and a Latino crew to a second truck. The Latinos picked six truckloads of cucumbers compared to one truckload and four bins for the probationers. “It’s not going to work,” Mendez said. “No way. If I’m going to depend on the probation people, I’m never going to get the crops up.” You’d think that someone would figure out that undocumented laborers working for crap wages are what keeps food prices low enough for the entire nation. But then, you’d be assuming that these showboating politicians are smart enough to think of anything that can’t fit on a bumper sticker.
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LONDON — Harry Potter’s adventures are going digital. Author J.K. Rowling announced Thursday that her seven Potter novels will be sold as e-books starting in October – ending the boy wizard’s status as one of the highest-profile holdouts against digital publishing. The magical stories that conquered the world in print form will be available as audiobooks and e-books in multiple languages through a new website, “Pottermore.” Rowling also has written 18,000 words of new Potter material for the interactive site, which promises to immerse users in her world of wizards, combining elements of computer games, social networking and an online store. Rowling says the site includes “information I have been hoarding for years” about the books’ characters and settings. “Pottermore” has been the subject of intense speculation among Potter fans since it appeared on the Internet with the words “coming soon.” The project unveiled in London lets Potter fans delve into the world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Sections let users shop for wands in Diagon Alley, travel to Hogwarts from the imaginary Platform 9 3/4 at London’s King’s Cross train station and be sorted into Hogwarts school houses by the perceptive Sorting Hat. Along the way are wand fights, games and new information about characters beloved around the world, including Harry’s reviled relatives, the Dursleys. The site goes live July 31, when 1 million registered users will be chosen to help flesh out the online world. It will be open to all users from October, in languages including English, French, German and Spanish. “(It’s) a way I can be creative in a medium that didn’t exist when I started the books back in 1990,” Rowling told reporters, a way to incorporate the thousands of “stories, drawings, ideas, suggestions” she still receives from fans, four years after the last Potter book was published. Harry Potter fans who have been sharing enthusiasm and stories online for years should be delighted by the new digital world. But Rowling said she wanted to keep the emphasis of the site firmly on the written word. “We’ve had a lot of requests for online games,” she said. “I wanted to pull it back to reading.” The seven Harry Potter novels have sold more than 450 million copies and made Rowling one of the world’s richest women. The last book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” was published in 2007, and Rowling said she still has no plans to write an eighth. But she said Pottermore was a way to reconnect with a character and a universe she loved. “It is exactly like an ex-boyfriend,” Rowling said. “Finishing writing Harry – I have only ever cried in that way and that much when my mother died. I have never cried for a man the way I cried for Harry Potter.” The latest Warner Bros. film, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2,” has its world premiere in London on July 7.
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